Musée No:792.036
Regular price £25.00Apple Blossom
Artist: Martin Johnson Heade
Date:1873
Martin Johnson Heade (1819 –1904) was an American painter. He started out as a portraitist and took up landscape painting later in life. He received his first art training from the folk artist Edward Hicks. He spent three years travelling around Europe and lived in Rome for two years. This first Grand Tour marked the start of an itinerant lifestyle which he continued to lead throughout his life. He painted both still lifes and landscapes, paying exquisite attention to detail and bringing a scientific naturalism to all of his works. Though he was friendly and associated with the Hudson River School painters, he was more interested in focusing on atmospheric effects, light, and the intimate details of a scene. He moved around the U.S and between 1860 and 1870 he travelled to Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica, where he created jewel-like paintings of tropical flowers and birds, especially hummingbirds. He is perhaps best known for his salt marsh landscapes and seascapes, the paintings show the calm and splendour of the salt marshes and are characterised by great precision and luminosity. It was later dubbed Luminism.
In 1883, at the age of sixty-four, Heade married and moved to Florida, where he continued to paint the tropical flowers that grew there. He died 20 years later, almost completely forgotten by the art world. His reputation was revived along with a renewed interest in 19th century American art in the 1940s.
